- My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph McAllister,
was born in Battle Creek in 1895. He does not know that his first grandchild
is an international expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S.
nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became a whistleblower at the
Livermore lab. Depleted uranium is very, very, very nasty stuff:
-
- Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of
weapon of mass destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal
Code Title 50 Chapter 40 Section 2302.
-
- DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements,
Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws
and U.S. military law.
-
- Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity
equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere.
That is 10 times the amount released during atmospheric testing which was
the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently contaminated
the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a half-life of
2.5 billion years.
-
- The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU "conventional"
weapons when in fact they are nuclear weapons.
-
- DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems:
it is a heavy metal "chemical" poison, a "radioactive"
poison and has a "particulate" effect due to the very tiny size
of the particles that are 0.1 microns and smaller.
-
- The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan Project
memo to Gen. L. Groves that recommended development of radioactive materials
as poison gas weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets.
-
- DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators,
but even more effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical
affinity for phosphate structures concentrated in DNA.
-
- DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps giving
and keeps killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it
off because it continues to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over
20 steps.
-
- Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
stated in August 2004 that over 518,000 Gulf-era veterans (14-year period)
are now on medical disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the battlefield
in that same period. Over 500,000 U.S. veterans are homeless.
-
- In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies before
the war, 67 percent of the post-war babies are born with severe birth defects
- missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.
-
- In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times
higher levels of gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive
body burden daily of inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
are uninhabitable.
-
- Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right
conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and
releases 12,000 alpha particles per second.
-
- Before my grandfather died, he told me that his generation
had made a mess of this planet. I wonder what he would say to me now I
would tell him to see "Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com),
a new documentary about the history of treason by the U.S. government against
our own troops: Atomic veterans, MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and DU. After Vietnam,
Henry Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals
to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . ." (from Chapter 5 in the
"Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein).
- _____
-
- Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist,
with a B.S. degree in geology from University of California at Davis, a
M.A. degree in Near Eastern studies from University of California at Berkeley
and has done post-graduate work in the geosciences at UC-Davis. She is
environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley, Calif.
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